Not even a great-ish performance from Brendan Gleeson can disguise the confusion at the heart of “Calvary,” the new Irish movie from writer/director John Michael McDonagh.

As the film begins it seems to be setting up a Hitchcockian dilemma. In the confessional, Father James (Gleeson) is threatened by a parishioner who as a child was repeatedly raped by his parish priest.

The perpetrator is long dead, but the victim still wants revenge. He announces (we hear his voice, but don’t see him) that in just a week he will kill Father James. The fact that James is a good priest and in no way connected to the long-ago outrage will only make for a more devastating “statement.”

James thinks he knows who this individual is. And his superior informs him that when a priest’s life is threatened, the sanctity of the confessional is no longer an issue. James is free to go to the police.

But he doesn’t…which is only one of many improbabilities McDonagh pile atop one another.

“Chinese Puzzle” is the third film in a series that began in 2002 with “L’Auberge Espangnol,” about a group of college foreign exchange students living in a Barcelona boarding house.

Writer/director Cedric Klapisch checked in on those same characters as they turned 30 in 2005’s “Russian Dolls.”

“Chinese Puzzle,” the third installment, finds the characters hitting 40 and no more at ease in matters of love than they were as adolescents.

Caplisch’s films are less well known than the celebrated “Seven Up” documentary series (which has followed a group of former British schoolchildren for half a century) or Richard Linklater’s “Before…” films that periodically revisit lovers played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.

But as with those other efforts, Klapisch’s films are bit like a reunion with old friends. The characters may be fictional, but there’s something oddly moving about watching the same actors play the same characters at different stages in life.

As “Chinese Puzzle” begins, Klapisch’s central character, Xavier (Romain Duris), has achieved a degree of fame as a novelist. He and his former college housemate, the British Wendy (Kelly Reilly), are married with two kids. Xavier still hangs with his best friend, the tomboyish lesbian Isabelle (Cecile De France).

He thinks life is swell. So he’s floored when Wendy returns from a business trip to New York and announces that she’s met someone and is moving to the U.S. — and taking the children.

When Isabelle announces that she, too, has fallen for a New Yorker and is immigrating, Xavier figures there’s not much left for him in Paris. He jumps the pond.

“Chinese Puzzle” — that’s how Xavier describes his knottily confusing life — is a round robin of friendships and potential romances. Not to mention a comedy of dislocation as the Gallic Xavier learns to negotiates the brave new world of NYC.